So what does one mean by domain parking? Parking your domain is an advertising practise used mainly by domain registrars and internet advertising publishers to create money from type-in traffic to an blank website. The url will typically resolve to a page containing only advertisements or links to affiliate programs. There is typically no useful information of any value to the user who typically clicks on one of the links just to get away from the page. The domain owner is normally paid based on the number of clicks and the resulting benefit derived from those clicks.

Is it feasible to generate income from domain parking? Yes it is! Some webpreneurs have portfolios of thousands of such sites that generate hundreds of thousands of dollars every month. Some of these portfolios of sites have been reportedly sold for millions of dollars to Private Equity funds. One Canadian domainer has managed to sign an agreement with the government of Cameroon. Cameroon sites end with a ".cm". Many internet users mistakenly type in ".cm" instead of ".com" and all of the unregistered sites resolve to a parked domain page containing advertisements. This individual is reported to make millions of dollars each year, his reward for assisting the Cameroon government monetize this phenomenon!

My personal experiments with domain parking programs like Sedo and GoDaddy has been pretty lousy. I had several domains with Sedo for two years and I made on average 1 cent per month! Not even enough to bare the expense of the domain registration fee each year. GoDaddy was worse. They wanted me to pay between $3.50 and $9.99 per month in order to park your domain there. I had just one site for several months but I was unable to make enough money to even cover the cost of this fee, even though it wasn't a lot to begin with. I think that if you're a bulk domainer with thousands of URLs, you might achieve more traction than I did. But I wouldn't count on it.

Before you think that you can jump in and buy several domains and snowball your parking efforts, remember that you're already very late to the game. It's now a very cut-throat playing field and there are several thousands of cyber squatters trying to generate money from domain parking. All of the 2 & 3 letter domains are all gone and so are most of the 4 letter domains too! Getting type-in traffic is usually a lot easier with shorter domain names or dictionary words. With Private Equity companies getting in on the action, there's more than enough money being spread around to buy up all the possible dictionary words and their possible permutations and combinations.

However, you don't need to completely dismiss the idea of domain parking. There are still many ways to make some money. Some of them involve creating MFA (made for adsense) domains that have a little bit of content which brings organic traffic but are heavily optimized for adsense ads. This is significantly more cumbersome than ordinary domain parking and a lot more time-consuming. There are ways to automate this procedure, but many of these processes require a bit of cash outlay for software tools that all create indentical duplicate content for all users. Creating unique content is highly important for ranking high in the search engines and getting their traffic. There are ways to automate this process without spending any money but thats a new topic for another article.